How to Repurpose Your Content to Boost Traffic and Win the Internet

Timeless topics shouldn’t be shelved between your yester-posts. You can wipe the dust off of your evergreen content and put it on a fresh suit for a whole new audience to see. Get new linkbacks, boost your message, and seal your name. As long as it’s relevant, you can go crazy with social media, Youtube, LinkedIn, Slideshare, among many others, to repurpose your words.

With a hip face, a different platform, and a mightier scheme, your content lives on. See how these industry experts got creative.

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Pay attention to your archives.

Some of your older blog posts might actually be the best ones to repurpose so dig back into your archives for the gold hidden there! - D. Rowse

Darren Rowse
Speaker, author, and founder of ProBlogger

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The web is increasingly a visual place and on social media – where the bulk of your repurposed content will probably end up – the visuals are what can make or break what you do. So pay particular attention to the design of what you’re creating and consider investing in some outsourced help if design and visuals are not your thing.

To be clear – what we’re talking about here is not simply re-promoting content you’ve already written on social media. We’re also not talking here about rewriting or updating old blog posts in a new way. There’s nothing wrong with re-promoting or rewriting – but repurposing content is about creating new content in a new medium based upon what you’ve already done.

Darren Rowse

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Take your longer blog posts, break them into parts, and then publish shorter versions on LinkedIn and Facebook. - K. Hines

Kristi Hines
Kikolani

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Since LinkedIn has introduced their own professional publishing platform and Facebook’s latest page redesign now includes notes in the sidebar (see the Facebook for Business page), it means that you will want to consider content for your social media profiles beyond just short status updates.

Last, but not least, if your business is publishing ebooks, you can divide up the content in a multitude of ways that can help you reach more audiences and promote your ebooks.

Take an inventory of your content. Create a simple spreadsheet where you list URLs to the content you have (blog posts, videos, etc.), titles, and ideas on how to repurpose each piece of content.

Kristi Hines

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True repurposing requires that we alter it to make it fresh and appealing to a new audience. - K. Lee

Kevan Lee
Director of Marketing at Buffer

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To do this, take a list post that you’ve created and break out each item on the list into a post of its own. The reverse of the numbered list idea is also true. You can take a group of 5 to 7 related posts and collect them into a single summary post.

Interesting statistics, meaningful quotes, and actionable advice can make for effective slides, and the resulting presentation can offer an easy-to-read recap of your original content. Creating the slides is made easy with free photo-editing programs like Canva.

Create a Pinterest instructographic. A cousin of the infographic, instructographics have a very similar look and feel but focus more on the how-to aspect. The word itself is a mashup of instructions and graphics, so clearly there should be a teaching element to the design.

Repost and re-promote to social media. It might seem counterintuitive to share the same content to the same audience, but we have found it to be effective for hitting people in different time zones, reaching new followers, and testing variations of headlines.

Kevan Lee

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Repurpose your content marketing on medium.com.

You can easily republish your content days, weeks, or even months after the original story was published. All you need to start is a Twitter account and a desire to be heard.

Republished blog content doesn’t have to be an exact replica of the original. In fact, you should always take a new approach. Try a different headline, or add/remove content from the original article to create an original post. - G. Moon

Garrett Moon
CEO and co-founder at CoSchedule

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Social Media Today is a classic syndication site where you can submit content directly or “magically” through your RSS feed.

BizSugar is a place to share “small business news and tips” and offers an active community.

Examiner, like Medium, allows you to re-post your content to a new audience. Unlike Medium, however, Examiner is something that you will have to apply to be a part of. No worries, though. The process seems very painless.

Garrett Moon

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Highlight content that can be easily made into one-liners.

Use a similar content combo on Facebook as you did on Twitter. Add quotes, statistics, etc., to links and post them. While this is an excellent strategy you can use on multiple platforms, try not to post the same content on different networks at the same time.

Although you’re not limited to 140 characters on Facebook like you are on Twitter, still try to write posts that are short and to the point. Also, stay conversational in tone. - R. Livermore

Rebecca Livermore
Digital media strategist and author

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An image with a quote can do the talking for you on Facebook.

While there are multiple options for image size on Facebook, square images work best because they look great in the news feed, timeline, and on mobile devices.

Content repurposing is a cycle. Write a blog post and repurpose it for SlideShare and YouTube. Then use those presentations to create content for new blog posts. (Be sure to embed them in the post.) Use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and a host of other social networks to drive traffic to both.

In my small business, I have many old blog posts that still have valuable ideas. I can “re-use” this basic content a number of ways, including: assembling several posts into a free eBook or whitepaper; designing a Slideshare presentation based on the content; narrating those slides, recording it, and; posting it as a YouTube video.

After a year or so, re-writing the original ideas into a new post using the posts as chapter in a book or customer guide.

Mark Schaefer

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Turn your infographic into a videographic.

Lighting is incredibly important with video. Harsh florescent lighting is everywhere indoors. Avoid it if you can. Natural light is better, but more difficult to get if you’re indoors. You don’t want light shining right in your face. You want it to be shining at you, but spread out. - N. Patel and A. Agius

Neil Patel and Aaron Agius
Entrepreneur ; content marketer

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Hire a designer to create a .pdf document that looks nice and is downloadable from your website. Upload the PDF to Docstoc, which is a library of documents and resources. It’s a place to syndicate your blog content repurposed as whitepapers, guides and other PDF documents.

Hire a professional voice on Fiverr to read & record your post aloud to create a podcast. Go to Fiverr and search for a professional voice. Pay someone to read your blog post aloud while recording themselves doing so.

Neil Patel and Aaron Agius

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You can even take your PowerPoint slides and present a live webinar for your audience.

Finally, you can use the free software, Audacity, to create an audio file of your content. You can then use this MP3 file to create a podcast. The BEST tutorial I have seen on setting up your own podcast is from Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com. If you are considering a podcast, check it out here.

Shelley Hitz

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When posting video on YouTube, make sure to link back to your website in the description, engage with the commenters, and encourage them to follow your brand’s channel. - A. Kuenn

Arnie Kuenn
CEO of Vertical Measures

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YouTube offers the ability for users to create branded channels where they can upload endless video content. For example, if you frequently host webinars or interviews, you can record and post that awesome content on YouTube to reach a larger audience

If you conduct case studies or other research, Slideshare is an excellent distribution channel for informative, credible content that will provide great value to readers. The bulk of content shared on SlideShare and other presentation sharing-sites is the traditional PowerPoint presentation.

The more you create content for distribution, or repurpose content for distribution on multiple channels, the more your brand will show up in search, and the more opportunities you’ll create for sharing.

Arnie Kuenn

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While Google Plus and Pinterest are excellent resources for visual content, do not neglect other social networks such Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Go back through past posts in your Google Analytics and scan for those that performed well. Now look to see if there was any one article that felt unfinished or would possibly warrant additional information due to changes or updates. - R. Radice

Rebekah Radice
Author and entrepreneur

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Writing a follow-up post is a great way to breathe new life into your old post by linking back to it as a reference. And don’t forget the added bonus of additional traffic when you revive a hot topic.

Use the tool “Save Publishing” to grab snippets or quotes from your post to break up your article into bite-sized tweets. Use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule these tweets throughout the month. And make sure to change up the type of tweet.

About Post Author

Francesca Devin is a creative writer scribbling the quirks of the universe in a prose that not just melts in your mouth, but cracks on each bite. When she’s not styling words or crafting adventures, she writes about publishing, book marketing, and the deep woodlands of soulful writing.
Follow her on Twitter here: @FrancescaDevinn